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Niall Ferguson, the historian at Harvard, has managed to stir up something of a rumpus over the past couple of days. We might even upgrade that to a row actually. His claim was that because John Maynard Keynes was both gay and childless, therefore he didn't really care about the long term: that long term only being of interest to those who have children who are going to see it.

This is wrong on so many different levels that it's complicated to point them all out. It should be said that Ferguson has withdrawn the remarks and apologised for making them. But it's still worth pointing out at least some of those levels of wrongness.

Perhaps the first and most obvious point to make is that in a Darwinian sense caring for the future does not require that you have your own children. JBS Haldane's quip that he would lay down his life for two brothers or eight cousins shows this. It is not the survival of the self that matters, of course not, for we all know that that ends. Nor is it the survival of our own genes: it's the survival of the same genes that we carry which is, in the Darwinian sense, what drives the concern for posterity. Keynes had both a brother and sister and the brother certainly went on to have children (four) so in this sense Keynes, while childless himself, was indeed interested in the long term.

What makes this error particularly delicious is that one of the theories about the existence of homosexuality is that while it's fairly clearly unlikely to increase one's own reproductive success it is thought that, in some manner, it might increase the reproductive success of one's siblings. Thus why homosexuality continually reappears, generation after generation. Not everyone agrees with this theory but it is quite widely held to be true.

The second is the way that Ferguson actually framed his answer. The original question put to him was about:

What is supposed to have prompted Ferguson to these meditations was a question comparing Keynes to Edmund Burke. According to the main report, “Ferguson responded to a question about Keynes’ famous philosophy of self-interest versus the economic philosophy of Edmund Burke, who believed there was a social contract among the living, as well as the dead.” As Ferguson explained in the apology he subsequently issued, “The point I had made in my presentation was that in the long run our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are alive, and will have to deal with the consequences of our economic actions.”

The problem with marking out Keynes' views as being radically different from Burke's as a result of his childlessness is that Burke himself only had one child. Who died, without issue, before Burke himself did. Their philosophies may well have been very different but it's most unlikely that children had anything to do with it.

The third level of wrongness is to assume that because Keynes was gay therefore he didn't want to have children. Quite whether we would call Keynes "gay" these days I'm really not sure. I'm afraid that I get a little confused in the changing meanings of certain words. Keynes most certainly did have same sex sexual relationships, this is very definitely true. He recorded many of them in his diaries so we do know this to be true. However, he also married, which we can take any way we want really. Many gay men have indeed been or even are currently married in the conventional sense. However, he and his Russian ballerina wife, Lydia, most certainly attempted to have children:

It was Keynes’ links with the theatre that brought Cambridge into Lydia’s orbit. Lydia was thirty-five in 1927. She had steered clear of any further ballet engagements in order to have a child. The letters she and Maynard exchanged give only vague hints of what happened. There is some suggestion that she miscarried in May 1927, Keynes assuring her that ‘we shall have in the end what we so much long for’….Then apparently she became pregnant again. On Monday 10th October 1927, Keynes wrote: ‘Dearest Lydochka, Well, I have had the telegram - the sad deed is done and my dear little bun has had its throat cut. No more to be said until I see it [you?], except a tender touch where the sweet bun was.’

Even though Keynes was indeed childless he apparently didn't want to be which makes ascribing his economic views to his childlessness pretty odd.

Henry Blodget tells us that this attack on Keynes is unprecedented: actually, no it isn't. Blodget:

First, this is the first time we have heard a respectable academic tie another economist's beliefs to his or her personal situation rather than his or her research. Saying that Keynes' economic philosophy was based on him being childless would be like saying that Ferguson's own economic philosophy is based on him being rich and famous and therefore not caring about the plight of poor unemployed people.

The criticism of Keynes and his childlessness actually surfaced very soon after his death. Or rather, a snide connection between his short term outlook at his childlessness did. Schumpeter in fact:

He was childless and his philosophy of life was essentially a short-run philosophy.

That's from 1951 so it's certainly not true that Ferguson was the first to try and make the point.

And the final level of wrongness is that Ferguson is using Keynes' "In the long run we are all dead" comment in entirely the wrong manner. As Paul Krugman points out:

But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.

That is the original quote. I will admit to being a little iconoclastic in my interpretation of that. I take it as a rebuff to those of the Austrian School of economics. Austrians tend to believe (and my own beliefs are on the fringes of that school) that things will generally sort themselves out, that intervention is likely to make things worse. That is, in the long run, meddling in the economy is not only unnecessary, it's something that we should positively avoid. I have the advantage over both Keynes and Schumpeter of seeing what another 80 years of political interference has done to the economy.

Nevertheless, I would agree that but in the long term we're all dead is a useful counterblast to that view. If you believe, as Keynes did (and as Krugman et al do today) that there are actions we can take that will make things better for people right now, today, then it's a very good way of dismissing those who insist that it'll all be fine in a decade or two so why bother?

There's nothing quite as petty as academia of course and my supposition, based on that admittedly iconoclastic reading of Keynes' "long term" comment, is that it was a dig at Schumpeter (the leading Austrian economist) and one that Schumpeter couldn't resist having a dig at in return in his academic obituary of Keynes (most of which is almost excessively laudatory I should point out).

I think Craig Pirrong has the right idea about what to look out for next.

I am counting down the seconds until the demands that he be banished from Harvard start flying, apology or no. Liberal in Good Standing Larry Summers was defenestrated as Harvard President, for crissakes, of uttering a politically incorrect remark. And this after he groveled. If they can drive out the President of the university, and a former Treasury Secretary in a Democratic administration, eliminating the mere Tisch Professor of History, a conservative no less, should be child’s play.

With the added bonus that what Larry Summers was actually correct: Ferguson not so much.

And of course, the coup de grace to Ferguson's argument is that it was this same JM Keynes who wrote "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren". 'Nuff said really, you'd rather expect an economic historian to know that one.